“How can I help you?”
“I need to ask something confidential.”
He nodded and took me down the hall and out of the building. We sat in a cafeteria in the School of Medicine, each with a hot beverage that neither of us wanted.
“This is a bit embarrassing. I know you’re not a clinician, but I have nowhere else to go. Robin’s in trouble. His grade school is threatening me with the Department of Human Services if I don’t dope him up.”
He took an instant to place Robin. “Has he been diagnosed with something?”
“So far the votes are two Asperger’s, one probable OCD, and one possible ADHD.”
He smiled, bitter and sympathetic. “This is why I dropped out of clinical psych.”
“Half the third-graders in this country could be squeezed into one of those categories.”
“That’s the problem.” He looked around the cafeteria, scanning for colleagues who might overhear us. “What do they want to put him on?”
“I’m not sure his principal cares, so long as Big Pharma gets their cut.”
“Most of the common meds are pretty normalized, you know.”
“He’s nine years old.” I caught myself and calmed down. “His brain is still developing.”
Martin raised his hands. “That’s young, for psychoactive drugs. I wouldn’t want to experiment on my nine-year-old.”
He was a clever man. I could see why my wife liked him. He waited me out. At last I confessed, “He threw a thermos at a friend’s face.”
“Huh. I broke my friend’s nose once. But he deserved it.”
“Would Ritalin have helped?”
“My father’s treatment of choice was the belt. And it turned me into the exemplary adult you see before you.”
I laughed and felt better. Quite a trick on his part. “How do any of us make it to adulthood?”
My wife’s friend squinted into the past, trying to remember her son. “How bad would you say his anger gets?”
“I don’t know how to answer that.”
“He did peg that boy.”
“That wasn’t entirely his fault.” Nothing was ever entirely anyone’s fault. His hands got confused.
“Are you afraid he might hurt someone? Has he ever come after you?”
“No. Never. Of course not.”
He knew I was lying. “I’m not a doctor. And even doctors can’t give you a reliable opinion without a formal consult. You know that.”
“No doctor can diagnose my son better than I can. I just want some treatment short of drugs that will calm him down and get his principal off my back.”
The man came to attention, as he once did while looking at my wife’s brain scan. He leaned back in the plastic scoop of his chair. “If you’re looking for non-pharmacologic therapy, we could put him in one of our trials. We’re testing DecNef’s efficacy as a behavioral intervention. A subject your son’s age would be a valuable data point. He’d even make a little pocket money.”
And I could tell Dr. Lipman my son was enrolled in a behavioral modification program at U Double U. “There wouldn’t be any human-subject concerns with someone that young?”
“It’s a non-invasive process. We train him how to attend to and control his own feelings, the same way behavioral therapy does, only with an instant, visible scorecard. The Institutional Review Board has signed off on projects a lot dicier than ours.”
We walked back to his office. The trees were bare and snow crystals wavered sideways in the air. It smelled like the year would end a little early, this year. But undergrads drifted past us still in shorts.
Currier explained how much had changed since Aly and I had volunteered to be target subjects. DecNef was maturing. Discovery and validation cohorts at universities here and throughout Asia were probing its clinical potential. DecNef was showing promise in pain management and the treatment of OCD. Connectivity Feedback was proving useful in managing depression, schizophrenia, and even autism.
“A high-performing trainee—someone who shows a knack with the feedback—can enjoy symptom amelioration for several weeks.”
He described what was involved. The scanning AI would compare the patterns of connectivity inside Robin’s brain—his spontaneous brain activity—to a prerecorded template. “Then we’ll shape that spontaneous activity through visual and auditory cues. We’ll start him on the composite patterns of people who have achieved high levels of composure through years of meditation. Then the AI will coax him with feedback—tell him when he’s close and when he’s farther away.”
“How long does the training last?”
“We sometimes see significant improvement after only a few sessions.”
“And the risks?”
“Lower than those of the school cafeteria, I’d say.”
I bit down on my anger. But he saw it.
“Theo. Forgive me. I was being glib. Neural feedback is an assistive procedure. Anything happening to his brain is something he’s learning to do himself, by reflection, concentration, and practice.”
“Like reading. Or taking a class.”
“That’s right. Only faster and more effective. Probably more fun, too.”
At the word fun, a look crossed his face, and the weirdest intuition told me he was remembering Alyssa. The two of them had sat still for hours, side by side in the middle of nowhere, just looking. You don’t always get them by the specific field marks, Aly taught me, before boredom led me to abandon birding with her. You know them by the shape, size, and impression. You feel them. We call that getting the jizz.
“Marty, thank you. This is a lifesaver.”
He waved me off. “Let’s see what results we get.”
I left him at the door of his office. When I stuck out my hand, he wrapped me in an awkward side-hug. On the wall behind him was a poster of a tree-lined beach with the words:
The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.
I was entrusting my traumatized son to a careerist neuroscientist-birder who still had a thing for my dead wife and decorated his office with cheesy posters quoting Thoreau.
YOU MEAN, LIKE A VIDEO GAME? My son loved games, but they also scared him. The fast-twitch shooters or the action scrollers where you had to jump at just the right moment made him nuts. He’d attack them with zeal, then retreat, routed, in a fury. They stood for the whole pecking order of competition that ruled the kingdom of his peers. When a certain racing game made him throw my tablet across the room and I banned him from playing it again, he seemed relieved. But he adored his farm. He could click on his fields to get wheat and click on the mill to grind flour and click on the oven to bake bread, all day long.
“Yes,” I said. “A little like a game. You’ll try to move a dot around on a screen or make a musical note sound softer or louder or higher or lower. It’ll get easier with practice.”
All with my brain? That’s insane, Dad.
“Yep. Pretty crazy.”
Wait. It’s like something. It reminds me of something else. He paddled the air with one hand and sawed at his chin with the other—warning me to let him think. He snapped a finger. Like one of your worlds. “Imagine a planet where the people plug their brains into one another.”
“This isn’t quite like that.”
Do you think that scanner could teach me to paint better?
It seemed like something Currier might try one day. “You paint perfectly. They could use your brain to train other people to paint better.”
He beamed and ran to get his portfolio to show me his latest masterpiece, a birdwing pearlymussel. He had birds and fish and fungi now, and he was working on snails and bivalves.
We’re going to need a big table at the market, Dad.
I held the painting with both hands, thinking: No therapy could be better than this. But then my boy looked down and smoothed the paper with his guilty hands, and I saw the marks of enraged crumpling. He traced his fingers
on the painting with contrition. I wish I could see one of these. For real, I mean.
I GAVE CURRIER’S HANDOUTS to Dr. Lipman, along with three articles touting the therapeutic potential of the research. She seemed satisfied. Excited by the prospect of finger-painting with his brain, Robbie had two mercifully quiet weeks. For two weeks, I returned to my neglected duties and undid the damage to my in-box.
For Thanksgiving, we drove to Aly’s parents on Chicago’s West Side. The postwar, crowded suburban Tudor was the usual pressure cooker of glucose-fueled cousins, around-the-clock wall-sized sports no one was watching, and political shouting matches. Half of Aly’s extended family backed one of the opposition candidates now gearing up for the primaries. The other half backed our defiant President in his return to the world of half a century ago. By noon on Thursday, the White House’s new decree requiring everyone in the country to carry proof of citizenship or visas had Robin’s blood relations sniping at each other across the trenches of a static front.
His grandmother spoke the Thanksgiving dinner prayer. The whole table said amen and began passing the food in four different directions. Robbie said, Nobody’s listening to that prayer, you know. We’re on a rock, in space, and there are hundreds of billions of other rocks just like ours.
Adele was horrified. She gaped at me. “Is that any way to raise a child? What would his mother say?”
I didn’t tell her what her daughter would have said. Robin did that for me. My mother’s dead. And God didn’t help her.
The bickering table fell silent. Everyone looked to me to correct my son. Adele was on him before I could say a thing. “You need to apologize to me, young man.” She turned to me. I turned to Robin.
I’m sorry, Grandma, he said. And the whole table went back to bickering. Only his favorite aunt and I, seated at each side of him, heard him mutter under his breath like Galileo, but you’re wrong.
Throughout the meal, Robin pecked away at his beans, cranberries, and militantly gravy-free potatoes. His grandpa Cliff kept riding him, from across the table. “Have a little turkey, man. It’s Thanksgiving!”
When Robin finally blew, it was geothermal. He started screaming, I don’t eat animals. I don’t eat animals! Don’t make me eat animals!
I had to take him outside. We walked around the block three times. He kept saying, Let’s go home, Dad. Let’s just go home. It’s easier to be thankful there.
We got back to Madison and finished the holiday alone together. He started the treatment the following Monday afternoon. He slid into the same fMRI tube his mother once disappeared into. The techs asked him to hold still, close his eyes, and say nothing. But when they played him the Moonlight Sonata, my son laughed and shouted, I know that song!
“WATCH THE DOT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SCREEN.” Robin lay tiny in the scanner, staring at the image on the monitor above him. Pads held his head swaddled in place. Martin Currier sat at the panel in the control room. I sat next to him. He coached Robin through the earbuds. “Now let the dot move to the right.”
My son fidgeted. He wanted to click a mouse or reach up and swipe the screen. How?
“Remember, Robbie. No talking. Just relax and hold still. When you’re in the right mood, the dot will know it and start to move. Just stay with it and let it travel. Try to keep it at a middle height. Don’t let it go too far up or down.”
Robin held still. We watched his results on a monitor in the booth. The dot jigged and jagged like a water strider on the surface of a pond.
Currier walked me through it again. “He’s basically practicing mindfulness. Like doing meditation, but with instant, powerful cues steering him toward the desired emotional state. The more he learns how to get into that state, the easier that state is to get into. Get into it often enough, and we can take away the training wheels. He’ll own it.”
I watched my boy play a game of Blind Man’s Bluff with his own thoughts: Colder, colder, warmer . . .
Currier pointed as the dot jerked toward the upper left quadrant. “See? He’s frustrated. Now he’s getting angry. Maybe mixed with a little sadness.”
I pointed at the right-hand center, the place Robin was trying to reach. “What does this represent?”
Currier gave me that playful look that so annoyed me. “Step one of Enlightenment.” Half a minute passed. Then another. The dot settled down and drifted back toward the screen’s center. “He’s getting the hang of this,” Marty whispered. “He’s going to be fine.” Which made me anxious in whole new and creative ways.
I never knew what passed through my son’s singular head at any given moment. Few days went by when he didn’t surprise me. I know less about the planet he lived on than I know about Gliese 667 Cc. But I do know that when Robin settled into a groove, few things could deflect him. The dot swung in sullen, wary circles. It crept rightward under his nudging, even as it nudged him back. Massy and reluctant, the dot moved like a floater in your eye when you try to look at it. It crept, rocked back, and crept again, like a car getting pushed from a snowbank.
The prospect of victory excited Robin. Right at the finish line, he laughed, and the dot veered into the lower left quadrant. Inside the tube, Robin whispered, Shit, and the dot shot wildly around the screen. Contrition was instant. Sorry to curse, Dad. I’ll do the dishes for a week.
Martin and I started laughing. So did the techs. It took a minute for everyone to sober up and continue the session. But Robin had found the trick of it, and after a few more false starts and faster recoveries, my son and his dot achieved their joint goal.
A tech named Ginny adjusted Robin’s position in the scanner. “Wow,” Ginny told him. “You’re a natural at this.”
Currier tweaked the software and started a new run. “This time make the dot as big as the background shadow. Then hold it there.”
This new dot sat at the center of the screen. Behind it sat a paler disk, the target that Currier asked him to aim for. The dot shrank and grew in spasmodic concert with a different region inside Robin’s head. “We’re training intensity now,” Currier said. The dot bobbed like an oscilloscope wave or the bouncing volume-level lights on an old stereo. Robbie fell into a trance. The fluctuating dot calmed down. Gradually it grew from dime-sized to a half-dollar. He brought it into the target zone, then overshot. That upset him, and the dot fell away to nothing. He started again, lifting it on the wavering power of his mood alone.
Each time the dot aligned with the template size, it turned dusky rose. When the dot filled its background shadow long enough to glow, the scanner resounded with a short, victorious bell, and the dot reset.
“Now see if you can get it to turn green.” New feedback for new parameters of affect. I thought Robin might revolt. He’d been in the scanner for almost an hour. Instead, he cackled with pleasure and tranced out again. Soon enough, he’d learned how to run the dot through a rainbow of colors. Currier smiled his wry, dry smile.
“Let’s put this all together now. How about a green dot, the size of the background shadow, all the way on the center right? Hold it there for as long as you can.”
Robbie nailed the day’s final assignment fast enough to impress everyone. Ginny released him from the scanner, flush with success. He trotted into the control booth, swinging his palm above his head for me to high-five. His face had that look it got when I spun a planet into being for him at night: at home in the Milky Way.
That’s the coolest thing in the world. You should try it, Dad.
“Tell me.”
It’s like you have to learn to read the dot’s mind. You learn what it wants you to think.
We scheduled a follow-up for the next week. I waited until we’d left the building before grilling him. Currier could have his scans and data sets and AI analyses. I wanted words, straight from Robin’s mouth. And I wanted them for myself.
“How did it feel?” I wanted to hand him a picture of Plutchik’s wheel and have him point to the exact spot.
Still triumphant, he head-butted
my ribs. Weird. Good. Like I could learn to do anything.
The words puckered my skin. “How did you get the dot to do all those things?”
He quit the billy-goat butting and turned serious. I pretended I was drawing it. No. Wait. Like it was drawing me.
THEY WANTED ROBIN ALONE for the second session. Currier thought I might distract him. As part of that painful feedback-training called parenthood, I surrendered Robin to the power of others.
I could tell things had gone well when I picked him up at the lab. Currier looked pleased, although he played his cards close to his chest. Robin was walking on air, but without the usual mania. A strange new awe possessed him.
They gave me music this time. Dad, it was totally crazy. I could raise and lower the notes, and make them go faster and slower, and change the clarinet to a violin, just by wanting it!
I cocked an eyebrow at Currier. His smile was so benign it made me queasy. “He did great with the musical feedback, right, Robin? We’re learning to induce connectivity between the relevant regions of his brain. Neurons that fire together wire together.”
Astonishingly, Robbie let another man tickle him on the most sensitive part of his ribs. Currier said, “ ‘For use almost can change the stamp of nature.’ ”
What’s that supposed to be? Robin said. Like poetry or something?
“You’re something,” Currier said. Then he booked us for a third visit.
Robin and I walked from the neuroscience building to the lot where I was parked. He held my forearm, chattering. He hadn’t grappled me so much in public since he was eight. Decoded Neurofeedback was changing him, as surely as Ritalin would have. But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: there was no “Robin,” no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.
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